Hello, Internet. I’m blogging again. Or possibly not.
I’m starting to re-work my website, in anticipation of my next book. My first website, hosted on a comrade’s server, probably began around 1998. I called it “Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Homepage?” and mostly used it to store pictures, audio files, an occasional written piece for a couple of years.
In 2005, I took a break from union work and revamped the website to try this new-fangled “blogging” thing. I registered a domain name, shaunrichman.org (.org because I’m not running my life at a profit; Ha!) and that same comrade, Don Doumakes, hosted and helped me set up Bloxsom software to host it. For several years, I reviewed books, movies and records. I wrote political pieces, vaguely-biographical journal posts and generally tried to hone my craft with an eye towards eventually publishing.
At some point, I returned to active union work, and publishing had to take a backseat. I wrote so that I wouldn’t get rusty while I mostly wrote memos and campaign plans for union organizing. I switched to WordPress, and kept blogging (a little bit, here and there).
When I left the American Federation of Teachers, I began writing published pieces for In These Times, Jacobin and even scoring spots in the Washington Post and New York Times.
By the year 2020, I was promoting my first book, Tell The Bosses We’re Coming, I turned this into an author’s website–with a color scheme and graphics that matched the book and links emphasizing media appearances, biography, published pieces, newsletter subscription, blah, blah, blah. I let the old blog pieces–which never disappeared–slide into the background. If you searched for that mysteriously missing shoelace licorice or information on your old friend Don Busky, Google would lead you to that post on my website but there was no scrolling link to my old posts.
Now that I’m getting ready to publish a second book, We Always Had a Union, I need a redesign. Something that highlights all published materials and brings the old blog back. So, I’ve added a primary link in the navigation bar to my old blog posts. I’m writing a new blog post so that my top post there isn’t a five-year-old clam chowder recipe. I had decided a while back that if something was worth wiring that it was worth publishing and so I doubled down on pitching ideas and stopped posting thoughts-in-process. But with Twitter going down the drain and all of social media in flux, I might return to posting here every now and again. While drafting We Always Had a Union, I kept a diary of my process (at least for the first two years). Basically I riffed on things I found in the archives, books I read that were great or sucked, controversies in the literature. I blogged, to myself. I don’t know why. At this point it won’t be read, except by whatever weirdo wants to rifle through my papers when they’re deposited at Tamiment.
As I’m working on the next new book, I may bring those stray thoughts and hot takes here. Or not. Who knows?